Will Hines Dot Net

• Elvis Costello is doing a really cool podcast for iTunes where he talks about his first 10 years. It’s free and fun, Elvis fans!
• AOL did a pretty funny look at iPhone mania featuring myself and my co-worker who sits in the cubicle behind him. There’s a lot of me in it which is likely what interests me.
• I’m so in love with Google Reader that I stopped using My Fellow Jerks. However, for what it’s worth, My Fellow Jerks averages about 200 visits a day even without me obsessively checking it — not bad. Anyway, I now subscribe to about 50 blogs and I’m ready for more if anyone has any suggestions.
• I watched The Girl Can’t Help It this week starring Jayne Mansfield. It is ungood. However, it features a lot of cameos of the hit rock n’ roll bands of the day performing their stuff. The movie came out in 1956 and they did a pretty good job of nailing a lot of big names: Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Gene Pitney. Apparently they tried to get Elvis Presley but his fee was too much already. Anyway, the performances are stilted in that 50s-way: they’re lit like they’re in a museum, the colors are overly saturated — but I really loved watching them anyway. They were young and good. It’s a pretty good time capsule. Wouldn’t it be fun to do that with whatever you kids consider to be the hip bands of today? Even if they’re all emo, shoe-gazing keyboard-ridden monstrosities? I think it would be fun.
• Everyone together: Welcome Ray Allen back to New England basketball!

More Sketch and Awe at UCBT — 7pm tonight! Get out of work and stop by.

Cast: Sarah Burns, Jeff Hiller, Lennon Parham, Ben Rodgers, Charles Sanders

Writers: Susannah Becket, Anthony King, Chris Kula, Megan Neuringer, Shannon O’Neill, Gavin Speiller, Joe Wengert, Will Hines and the cast.

And now I will arbitrarily assign nicknames to all of those people and link their names to the first result from Google Images that has nothing to do with them:

Sarah “Desktop” Burns,
Jeff “Rock Quarry” Hiller,
Lennon “Slingshot” Parham,
Ben “Chuckles” Rodgers,
Charles “Charles Sanders” Sanders,
Susannah “Converyer Belt” Becket,
Anthony “Martini” King,
Chris “Dishwasher” Kula,
Megan “The Rock, The River, The Tree” Neuringer,
Shannon “Half Court” O’Neill,
Gavin “Bavin” Speiller,
Joe “Neck Punch” Wengert, &
Will “Arnold Wastebasket” Hines

Forget Square Pegs, playing Burger Time, re-watching V or even making references to old Gary Gygax manuals. If you want to be a TRUE retro 80s nerd, you should bust out your Radio Shack TRS-80 or your Commodore 64 or your Apple II+ and play Zork. It’s National Zork month (thanks to Rob Webber for alerting me to this). Wired has a good intro to Zork.

“Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.” Let’s get this GOING!

Edited to add: Eeep! You can play RIGHT NOW! Play Zork online.

P.S. “Zork” is a text-adventure. It’s a pre-cursor to games like “King’s Quest” and “Lesiure Suit Larry” in which you give commands to an avatar who tries to complete a quest for you. Except Zork has no graphics — there’s just descriptions of what you see and what your actions cause to happen. It’s called Interactive Fiction, but that term is almost as overwrought as “graphic novels.”

People still write text adventures and I still play them.

Three games.

1. Enter a friend’s apartment. As you walk by his/her shelves take note of a random movie, CD or book. Then after a few minutes earnestly ask if he/she has a copy of said media. “Say, do you have a copy of the special edition of The Emperor’s New Groove?” People sometimes laugh.
2. When someone expresses a half-hearted opinion while instant messaging with you, immediately respond with a sentence telling them that they in fact have the strongest possible version of that opinion. Like if someone says “I guess I kinda liked Die Hard,” you type back “You love every scene in Die Hard.” I really love doing that. To date, no one has responded in a way to indicate they even notice. Still.
3. When someone is explaining that they chose not to do something very innocuous, interrupt and ask them if they chose not to do that thing because they were scared. “I skipped brunch on Sunday.” “Because you were scared?” “No, I wasn’t scared.” It is great fun. No one ever laughs.

They’re all kind of annoying. I recommend them anyway.

Have, like, MILLIONS of my friends decided to go home to visit their parents this week? Especially the chicks! Am I right? I think I might be right!

I could easily not be right.

So I was riding home on the L train Saturday afternoon, when I saw Billy Hot Chocolate wearing a ridiculous-looking all lavender outfit (t-shirt, shorts, head and wrist bands). Turns out he was going to a Wet Hot American Summer party. I can’t remember the movie well enough to know how an all-lavender jogger outfit fits in, but I didn’t really need an explanation since Billy is a man silly enough to change his last name to “Hot Chocolate.”

Billy asked what I was up to and I explained that I was getting back from buying a coffee bean grinder. That sounded so lame compared to wearing an all-lavender outfit that I kinda amped up my excitement about my grinder. “New coffee grinder!” I said. “Going to be good.” Then I asked Billy if he wanted a cup and he said yes and came to my apartment.

I had invited him so abruptly that I kinda didn’t believe he was really going to come over until he actually got to my place. I thought maybe he got off the train with me as a joke and was just walking to his party. “Are you serious?” I asked him, after we’d walked five blocks from the train. And he said “Yeah. Were you?” And I thought about it and said “Yeah.” So we had a fine few cups of coffee and hung out for two hours and ended up talking about some heavy shit. I think before this Saturday I’d talked to Billy for maybe eight minutes in a row. That was pretty cool. Thank you, Billy.

My camera is messed up so that picture has a weird greenish tint that did not exist in reality. But Billy’s clothes are somehow appearing in the correct color.

My co-workers and I were filming outside the Apple Store on 5th Avenue yesterday. It was a fake news bit — filming tightly on our actors, though with the Apple Store in the background. About five minutes in, a security guard came over and (politely) asked us to stop filming. Then he corrected himself and said “Well, please don’t film the building.”

We acquiesced, but I was infuriated. The building is outside in a public space. Really public actually: Fifth Avenue and 59th Street of New York Fucking City. They didn’t build it there to be hidden or demure. They WANT it noticed. We weren’t being rude, we weren’t bothering (or even filming) their customers, and we were tucked tightly in one spot to avoid being in any one’s way. We were on the public sidewalk and not on its property. Am I allowed to walk out onto my city block and ask people to not look at my apartment building? I would argue that by demanding my unsolicited attention as I walk down the street, they are surrendering their right to control my unsolicited use of their appearance.

I don’t know the law, and my beef is not really one of civil legality. It’s one of innate rights to tell a story and form one’s own opinion.

I argue that a corporation’s main desire is to control everything around it. Its ability to make money is secondary. When we film a corporation’s headquarters, we threaten to seize the power to use its appearance as a symbol in a story, and who knows what the story will be? And corporations fear the power of stories and want to control them. If they could, they would control the use of their corporate symbols in all news stories, conversations and even thoughts.

What I love is that the guard, and by proxy, his corporate employee — had NO IDEA what our goal was or who we are. But they must reach out and squash any uncontrolled representation of itself as an entity.

I remember in 1987, my high school friends and I went into the Danbury Fair Mall one week after it opened with a VHS camera. We were filming each other on a bench in the community area, and a security guard asked us to leave. What possible damage could we have inflicted?

It’s what I loved about the short-lived science-fiction show Max Headroom. In that story, which takes place in the future, you need a license to own a camera, and people treat cameras with the same reverence and fear that people normally have towards guns. That show got it right!

I call upon all storytellers, writers, comedians, actors and conversationalists to willfully use all corporate symbols to their own ends regardless of law or even the point of what you’re saying! Just push back on the forces that want to tell you what to think. Start the precedent today that we own our thoughts and stories no matter what a privately-owned entity tries to tell us. Scorch the Earth! Stop the monsters!

Not that I did anything.

My computer here at work makes me change my password to login every 20 or so days, and I can never repeat an old password. It’s annoying. I’m sure the IT department would argue that it’s for security, to make sure no one can get into my computer. However, I posit that computer systems in general are overly worried about “people” finding out what your password is.

I say that because I sit next to an unassigned computer, which all of our free-lancers and interns use to check their email. Since they’re not full-time, they do not have a password to access. So I give them mine. And almost all of the time, no one can type it in — EVEN WITH ME TELLING THEM WHAT IT IS — in less than four attempts. “All uppercase? Wait, how do you spell that? Did you say ‘zero’ and THEN ‘i’?”

I don’t have crazily complicated passwords either. Once it was my last name “hines” — and someone kept typing “heinz” even when I spelled it letter-by-letter. I would say “H” and he would type “H.” Then I’d say “I” and he’d type “E.” I’d see him do that and say “You typed ‘E.’ I said ‘I.’” and he would say “oh.” Then I’d just type it in for him and he’d check his email.

They certainly can’t remember it from visit to visit. I wrote it on a post-it note and stuck it to the wall of the cubicle. They still ask me “what’s your password?” I point to the post-it note; they type it in incorrectly and ask me what it is, which I tell them for them to still type incorrectly.

I’m sure it makes sense to change your online passwords, especially to things like amazon.com where you might have credit card information stored. But in my experience passwords for things that require human beings to type them in are almost unsteal-able because human beings in general cannot remember series of letters and numbers of any length for even one second even when it being said to them as they have to remember it. Yours truly forever, Will Hines.

Happy Father’s Day to Jerome Bradford Hines:

That kinda looks like an oddly-square set of underpants. It’s actually a trash bag, captured here because on Christmas my father’s OCD requires him to discard all wrappings as soon as they hit the floor. I think he gets more satisfaction from throwing out those wrappings then he does receiving the presents.

Random facts about my father:

• Grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Remains a die-hard Browns fan.
• Spent most of his career negotiating contracts for an aerospace technology company. Today he’s an aide to special education teachers in Westport.
• To my memory, could not bear to intentionally lose any board game.
• Is a decent painter.
• Owns a nice house in Wilton, Ct with his girlfriend Lori. Today he finished painting one of the bedrooms.
• Prefers orange soda to all other sodas.
• Every now and then, has to do things like this:

I reset the play count of all songs in my iTunes library.